In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.
Day Minus Forty-Seven, 08:30
A lot can happen in three weeks. It is the biggest jump back so far.
Eight thirty in the morning, Day Minus Forty-Seven. Nearly seven weeks back in total.
Jen stops at the picture window on her way downstairs. The street looks completely different. The sepia-brown of late summer, grasses parched from lack of rain. The breeze against her arms is warm. She wonders what Andy would make of it.
She went to bed last night with Kelly. He did an admirable job of acting normally. You wouldn’t know anything had happened unless you’d overheard it.
He’d been lying on their bed, hands behind his head, elbows out to the side. A caricature of a relaxed husband. ‘Work good?’ he’d said.
‘Full of documents. What’d you do?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he had said. ‘Showered, dinner, scintillating stuff.’
She remembers this line from last time. She had thought Kelly was just being dry, but sitting underneath his words last night was a kind of quivering fury. A man who had lost control of a situation.
She’d gone to sleep next to him, her husband the betrayer, because she didn’t know what else to do. He’d spooned her as he always did, his body warm. Once he was asleep, she’d looked at the skin on his arms. His – like hers – didn’t look any different, but he was made of different stuff to what she had thought.
And now it is forty-seven days back. She feels utterly alienated again, like she did in those first few days. She has pink nail polish on her toes that she remembers getting done halfway through August, to see her through the final, warm, flip-flop days.
It’s mid-September. And what does she know? Kelly thinks Joseph is going to find something out, so he asked Todd to stop seeing Clio. He does, but then gets back together with her. Kelly asks Nicola Williams for help. Nicola is injured, and then Joseph shows up and Todd kills him.
Jen knows more than she did but, in many ways, it feels like less, it’s so confusing. The doorbell goes, interrupting her thoughts.
She checks the date again. Right – it’s the first day back at school, Todd’s first in Year Thirteen. She tries to spring herself back into action.
‘Who’s that?’ she calls.
‘Clio!’ Todd says. Jen leaps back from the window and into her bedroom. Did this happen the last time? Eight thirty … she’d have left already. Suited, booted, a typical weekday, latte in hand, divorces at the ready. But here, in the hub of family life, lies the secret. If he finds out, he’ll come here. That’s what Kelly said.
‘I’ll get it!’ Jen calls. Even though she’s in a tatty and ancient pair of maternity shorts – fucking hell, couldn’t she have worn something nicer to bed back in September? – and a T-shirt through which you can definitely see her boobs, she is going to answer that door. She pulls on a dressing gown and takes the stairs two at a time.
‘Hi,’ Clio says. And there she is. The woman her son has fallen in love with, breaks up with, gets back together with. Is forced to leave by his father. The woman – surely – at the heart of it.
Jen doesn’t know what to ask first.
‘Jen, right?’ Clio says. She – charmingly – reaches out to shake Jen’s hand. Her fingers are long and tanned from the summer, her grip loose, her skin dry, but soft, still child-like. She looks, otherwise, the same as in October. That fringe, those huge eyes, the whites of them shining healthily.
‘Yes, nice to meet you,’ Jen says.
‘I don’t start back until tomorrow, but I said I’d walk with Todd,’ Clio explains.
‘That’s quite enough,’ Todd says. His backpack is over his shoulders just like it was when he was five, eight, twelve. He, too, is tanned. Much healthier-looking than in October. Less burdened. Jen can’t stop looking at him, thinking of his tears last night, his fury. An explosive argument, and now this: a huge leap backwards. What does it mean?
Kelly emerges out of the kitchen but stops when he sees Jen. ‘Are you off work?’ he says to her. ‘I didn’t want to wake you …’
‘I think I’m sick,’ she says spontaneously. ‘I turned my alarm off. Throat like razor blades.’
‘Bunk off. Sod the lawyers,’ Kelly says.
‘An astounding lack of work ethic from the Dad there,’ Todd commentates.
Kelly turns his gaze to Todd. ‘Work hard enough and, one day, you too can bunk off,’ he says.
This phrase isn’t what makes Jen stop, makes her wish she could press pause to absorb this moment. It’s the look that passes between Kelly and Todd. Pure affection. There is nothing barbed under it whatsoever. Their eyes are alight.
When was the last time she saw them interact like this? She can’t remember.
Todd reaches out to shove him, a mock shove. Jen’s gaze lands on them.
Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of things as well as their presence. Evidence is often in what people don’t say. What they take out. The man who fiddles his accounts, trying to bury huge personal profit in twenty-five boxes of disclosure that he hopes the lawyers won’t be bothered to go through.
But she missed it at home. The lack of this easy banter. A clue in itself.
That is why she’s on this day, she thinks. To observe the contrast. The argument she overheard at the gate changed something for them, fractured it. And here she is, before it. And don’t things look completely different?
‘Anyway, nice to meet you,’ Clio says to Jen as Todd ushers her out.
‘Nice to see you again,’ she adds, looking at Kelly. And it’s this sentence that turns Jen’s attention away from Clio, and on to Kelly.
Her eyes meet her husband’s as Todd closes the door behind him. She doesn’t hear his car: they must be walking in the sun together. ‘Nice to see you again?’ she asks him.
‘Huh?’ He’s turned away from her, is heading into the kitchen. She reaches out for him. It’s legitimate. It’s perfectly legitimate to ask this, why Clio would say that to him, she tells herself. But why does she feel the need to think this way? She pauses. Because her husband can be evasive, comes the answer, from somewhere deep within her.
‘Have you met Clio before?’
‘Yeah, she came for lunch with Todd one day.’
‘Did she?’
‘Only for about five minutes. Think I interrogated her,’ he says with a charming smile. She can tell he’s thinking fast.
‘You never said. You never said you’d met her.’
Kelly gives a laconic shrug. ‘Didn’t think it was important.’
‘But you knew it would be important to me,’ she says. She hardly ever challenges her husband in this way. She’s always wanted to be … she doesn’t know. Easy-going. Easy to live with. ‘You know I’ve wondered what she’s like.’ She almost adds that she knows he knows her uncle’s friend. That, later, he asks Todd to stop seeing her, but she stops herself. He will only lie.
‘She’s nice,’ he says. The more she pushes, the more he dodges. She’s never noticed before, this quickstepping of his. Answering a different question. Answering the original question. He goes into the kitchen and opens a can of Coke. The pop of the ring pull sounds like a gunshot, which makes her jump.